Truth does not abandon the hearts that fly free.
Juanita Arrington Kolhs, passed away too young. My mother was only four years old. Yet she left stories behind that unfortunately took years to unfold. My father’s mother, Audrey Mae Stanton Bonner, was with us until 1976. I was a young mother at 28 when she passed. Known as Deedee mom to her familay. I had the privilege of knowing her and spending a great deal of time with her growing up and all throughout my early adult life.
They both packed water when needed, milked cows, grew vegetables and flowers. Harvested corn, beets, tomatoes, potatoes, and more. They both rode horses, and not for pleasure. Raised chickens and children along side of each other. They carried baby chicks in their aprons, safe from the cold and harm. My Grandmothers loved their babies with compassion and protection and demonstrated strength and courage in times of trial. Of which there were plenty.
Stories of these were brought to me by my parents. My Grandmother's carried courage in their hearts and handed that courage to me.
I know this. I am the first daughter still standing. I know this because I am a witness to their love and carry it deep in my heart and soul.
There are two stories here. I will write about my grandmother Juanita and my mother first.
I am the daughter of a mother who loved me deeply. She was raised without a mother from the age of four. Yet she knew how to love. I was deeply loved.
Never truely abandoned except at my own will. Life's lessons, my choices, my mistakes, the trials, and suffering from them all became my teachers. I take full responsibility!
My mother's childhood abandonment created unknown strength in her to love deeply and do her best. She accomplished just that.
My mother was left alone early by her mother to an illness of unknown magnitude. From stories and letters that I've read I beleive my grandmother suffered grief and depression herself. My mother carried that tangled un-named grief the whole of her life. She kept it hidden away in the darkness of her heart. It settled in her blood and bones and took her breath away. She suffered from asthma. As a young child her mother died too early and my mother was left with a magnitude of sorrow and no one to hold her or tell her stories, or comfort her. I know this, stories were told to me by my relatives and left in letters hidden for years in a trunk, and eventually by my mother herself. My grandfather was a dairy farmer. He had eighty acres to farm, worked hard from sun up to sun down. He grieved the loss of his wife. They were very much in love as my mother tells the story. However, without any support for the heartache his children were experiencing, they were all left with the tragedy and grief to carry on. Even though there were family members on both sides who did their best to comfort the family. I know this because I read the letters in the trunk written to my grandfather. The trunk sat in my mother's closet growing up as a child. She told me, she remembered the trunk was in her bedroom closet as a child. The trunk would eventually come to her by relatives who drove from Colorado to Washington to give it to her. The remains of some of Juanita's things still in the trunk, including letters my grandfather had saved over the years and a lock of her hair.
I read the letters in the trunk, that was carried from Colorado to my mother by great grand nieces in 2014, the summer before mom passed away at the age of 86. I was 67 years old.
I know this because I am the first granddaughter still standing and her trunk and the photos and letters of condolences was left to me and in my closet for some time before I finally read and labeld the letters, sorted out her thngs and, after heart felt turmoil, i needed to empty it completely, saving a few things and then taking the trunk to the second hand store. A treasure now for someone else.
My mother and I went through all that was in that trunk, but we did not read the letters in the cigar box together, she may have when I was not with her. I dont know. I recorded my mother telling me stories as we went through the pictures. The beautiful stories and the sorrows in her heart that she carried for so long were lifted during those days. I knew then how she learned to deeply love herself and her five children and her life. She did not allow the pain to confuse or manipulate her love. Nor did she allow the love between her parents that she felt and remembered to vanish from her heart.
My courageous mother was too young to be a breathless and motherless child. My Grandmother was too young to die. I know this because I feel it and I carry it in my heart. My mother demonstrated this love to me as a child, there were caps of course. How could there not be. As the oldest of five children, I sometimes was left to wander, growing up with that vulnerability and yearning for the answers that hid in a void. My mother did not know how to willingly share her pain and yet and still, she did in her actions that I came to understand. Nothing hurtful, just periods of caps and quietness which I witnessed in her not being able to show up for me at a school play or music concert or a gathering outside our family. In time as we worked together going through the contents in the trunk, which took a few months because too much was too much at one time, her heart lightened softened. She told me stories that were told to her about her mother, my grandmother. The fastest rider, the best at catching fish. How the children ran free and played joyfully and without fear. “Little urchins we were called by some of the farming neighbors”, my mother said.
Healing stories, some never really witnessed yet passed down. For truth does not abandon the hearts that fly free.
I'm the first daughter still standing now and I carry these stories and deep healing in my heart. I share them willingly.
Conversations held as miracles.
I carry the wisdom of the now untangled grief and weave it with the heart of my mother and grandmother with love, with the deep love, that was gifted to me from their lives and their stories and experiences. Healing that did not come without the tangled, strangling grief of a breathless child left wandering, vulnerable, and motherless, holding on the love in her heart and courageously offering that love to me and each one of her beloved children.
I know this now. Because I am the first daughter still standing and I am my mother's witness.
The story of my father's mother, Audrey Mae Stanton Bonner, is beautiful and courageous and painful. She first came to visit us when I was just learning to talk. My father wanted me to understand that his mother was coming to visit. I did not call my father daddy or Dada, I called him Deedee. He told me Deedee's mom was coming to visit. Thereafter, she was always Deedee mom to me, and throughtout her life to the rest of her grandchildren and family. Deedee mom was at our home for every birth. She cared for my mother and the new baby, she cooked and cleaned while mom rested from childbirth and nurtured us all. There are five children in our family. Deedee mom was there when my dad and I brought my baby brother and mom home from the hospital. I was fourteen at the time, I became her helper. There was much for me to do. Several months later when it was time for Deedee mom to leave, I stayed the helper of caring for my baby brother. I wheeled him in his stroller as I sold Girl Scout cookies all around the neighborhood. He was the center of attention at sleepovers and birthday parties.
Deedee mom was left to care for herself and her two sisters when she was about 12 years old. Her mother had passed away from an illness that I dont remember ever talking to her about. There are no stories that I can remember of her mother's illness. Never the less, Deedee mom became quite self relient at a very early age. My father tells me that when he was a boy he drove cattle with his father on a cattle ranch that they worked on. My grndmother was the camp cook, dad said. He has stories that he has written about and so I wont try to go between the lines here. His stories, which are recored, are wonderful in their own right. They are on our website, with his own link, Bob Bonner's Stories.
What I will write about is what I learned from Deedee mom. I spent a great deal of time with her. I stayed with her many weekends. By the time I was ten years old I knew how to make dresses and worked with her on hand made quilt projects. Deedee mom was a caretaker for a priest in a Catholic Church in Santa Clara, California and I would help her in her work. We would shop together. She taught me how to set the table for serving the priest breakfast and dinner. I learned how to cook in a style of presentation for the table. Beautiful side dishes with various colors and displays, just like in the cooking magazines. I learned how to buy a pork roast and how to make jello salad in just the right mold and with just the right fruit. In the evening she would sew on her machine and I would wartch her, sometimes helping. One weekend she decided I needed a new pair of pajamas. I stood by her sewing machine and watched her sew me a pair of blue flowered, flannel pajamas that I wore to bed that night.
In the Spring of 1976 she had been suffering from breast cancer and was just home from being in an after care nursing center. My father asked me if I would spend time with her. My children were 1 1/2 and 3 1/2 years old. We stayed with her for about a month. She was mostly bed ridden, but slowly found energy. We would sit together and go through her photo albums. She would share her stories and treasures. We would cook together. One day she got up from bed, knowing I would be leaving soon, and made me a beautiful pink flowered, long flannel nightgown. I was going back to Washingtion where I lived and she wanted me to be warm. I had made pajamas and robes for my children from what she taught me, so they did not have a need at the time. Those precious days were the last that I would be with my Deedee mom. I flew to her funeral in California the Fall of 1976 with my little daughters, joining my family and the hundreds that attended her funeral at the Methodist church in Santa Clara where she attended and where she is now buried.
I am the first daughter still standing. I am a mother. I am a Grandmother.
I am deeply loved. And I love deeply.
I am sometimes breathless with pain. I have healing stories of my own to share. I speak of them willingly, but not always. I learned this from all the beautiful women in mmy family who carried courage in their hearts. Released. Freed from wandering, knowing my heart and my path.
My daughters will not be breathless. Too often. My mother is no longer breathless. She Flies Free.
My daughters are deeply loved. I know this, because I see it, I feel it in their children, my six grandchildren. My grandchildren are deeply loved. They deeply love. I know this because I witness their love. I am their Grandmother. I am still standing.
My Grandmothers rode horses.
They carried courage in their hearts and passed it on to me. Courage to deeply love, held firmly like the strength of a horse that holds all the wisdom the ancestors carry. Passing it down through their hearts, with the power and strength of a horse, yet gentle as the soft downy feathers of a baby chick, like the smooth leather of a saddle bag.
I know this. I am Grandmother still standing. I hold the wisdom oh my ancestors in each breath I take.
I’ve learned how to breathe. They have gifted me the understanding, the wisdom of the trials, pain, and suffering. The power in my Grandmothers, in my mother, is the the power of their endless courage to love deeply. I know this.
I am First Daughter, Still Standing.
